New versions of Brave will hide—and, where possible, completely block—cookie consent notifications. Brave’s approach is distinct and more privacy-preserving than similar systems used in other browsers (such as the “auto-consent” systems used in other browsers), and helps keep the Web user-first.

Unlike other approaches, this won’t simply automate the process of clicking “no” in cookie-banners, Brave will block the cookie-banners themselves.

Goggles enable anyone, be it individuals or a community, to alter the ranking of Brave search by using a set of instructions (rules and filters). Anyone can create, apply, or extend a Goggle. Essentially Goggles act as a custom re-ranking on top of Brave’s search index.

This could be really cool! A few examples use cases:

• No Pinterest - Rerank results to remove pages / threads hosted on Pinterest.
• Rust programming - Rerank results to boost content related to the Rust programming language.
• Hacker News / 1k short – Prioritizes domains popular with the Hacker News community, minus those that would rank among the top 1000 most-viewed websites.

Brave is rolling out a new feature called De-AMP, which allows Brave users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages, and instead visit the content’s publisher directly. AMP harms users’ privacy, security and internet experience, and just as bad, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the Web.

The Brave team is really doubling down on privacy and security. I don’t think that strategy would’ve won users a few years ago, but in 2022 and beyond…

Brave Search has some similarities to DDG (which has been my default for a couple years now), but it’s different in that it builds its own index vs relying on Bing and Yandex. Brave’s principles:

1. Privacy: no tracking or profiling of users.
2. User-first: the user comes first, not the advertising and data industries.
3. Independence: Brave has its own search index for answering common queries privately without reliance on other providers.
4. Choice: soon, options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search.
5. Transparency: no secret methods or algorithms to bias results, and soon, community-curated open ranking models to ensure diversity and prevent algorithmic biases and outright censorship.
6. Seamlessness: best-in-class integration between the browser and search without compromising privacy, from personalization to instant results as the user types.
7. Openness: Brave Search will soon be available to power other search engines.

If those resonate with you, it’s worth a try. Not a Brave Browser user? You can still use search.brave.com.

Smart move by Brendan Eich and the Brave team:

Brave Search, the company insists, will respect people’s privacy by not tracking or profiling those using the service. And it may even offer a way to end the debate about search engine bias by turning search result output over to a community-run filtering system called Goggles.

The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option – for those who want to pay for search results without ads – though its more common incarnation is likely to be ad-supported, in conjunction with Brave Ads.

Privacy as a first-class feature continues to trend up! 📈

Brave CTO Brian Bondy:

IPFS is an exciting technology that can help content creators distribute content without high bandwidth costs, while taking advantage of data deduplication and data replication. There are performance advantages for loading content over IPFS by leveraging its geographically distributed swarm network. IPFS is important for blockchain and for self described data integrity. Previously viewed content can even be accessed offline with IPFS! The IPFS network gives access to content even if it has been censored by corporations and nation-states, such as for example, parts of Wikipedia.

This is a small-but-important step towards decentralizing the web, which is becoming more and more important to more and more people every day.

Brave has launched its “built on privacy” advertising platform that will give you 70% of the ad revenue share as a reward for your attention. I’m particularly interested in the opt-in nature of this platform as well as their promise of privacy and security.

Starting today, users of Brave’s latest release of the desktop browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux can choose to view privacy-preserving Brave Ads by opting into Brave Rewards. These users will receive 70% of the ad revenue share as a reward for their attention…

Brave Ads also provides brands with direct opportunities to highlight offers and engage with users as they browse the web. Since Brave Ads are opt-in, brands know with certainty that when their campaigns run with Brave, their ads are viewed by people who welcome advertising. Brave’s anonymous-but-accountable campaigns ensure that advertisers are connecting with the users they are seeking, removing the excessive costs, privacy, security, and fraud risks currently associated with middlemen in digital advertising.

Good news! The new Brave tipping banner is now available with the latest desktop browser update. This new banner makes the experience of tipping your favorite Brave-verified publishers and creators easy and on brand. Even better, it never bugs your audience and is only shown when they want to initiate a BAT tip.

If you podcast, blog, vlog, write tutorials, give talks, etc. then you should setup Brave Payments on your site and let your audience tip you with their attention! We’re doing it.

This week Adam and Jerod talk with Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave. They talked through the beginnings of Brave and how BAT (Basic Attention Token) could be driving the future of how we offer funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, they go deep into the historical and the technical details of the Brave browser and their march to Brave 1.0. The last segment of the show covers how BAT works, how it’s being used, and also their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user’s privacy.

Like many of you reading this, you’re probably signed into a Google service when browsing the web — Google apps (G Suite), YouTube, Gmail, etc. The line between browser (Chrome) and your signed in services was clear before, and now it’s not.

Matthew Green, Cryptographer and Professor at Johns Hopkins University, writes on his personal blog:

What changed? A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you. It’ll do this without asking, or even explicitly notifying you. However, and this is important: Google developers claim this will not actually start synchronizing your data to Google — yet.

Thankfully I have been using Brave a whole lot more recently and I’ve really been enjoying an internet where display ads aren’t ruining the experience, and where my privacy isn’t being harvested as I use it.

It’s nice to see Tor being baked into Brave! Tor is now available to the masses.

Today we’re releasing our latest desktop browser Brave 0.23 which features Private Tabs with Tor, a technology for defending against network surveillance. This new functionality, currently in beta, integrates Tor into the browser and gives users a new browsing mode that helps protect their privacy not only on device but over the network.

Do you use Brave on the daily? I have it installed, but I don’t use it on a daily basis.

Also — Brendan Eich tweeted this to give credit where credit is due and this tweet about the relays added.